Microwave Biscuit

I have a multitude of PCs at my house and not all of them are open source based machines but I’m trying. Today I did some housekeeping on a machine that was once my “primary” computer that runs Windows XP. I uninstalled everything that I don’t really use. It’s pretty much down to one or two games and that’s it. As I was going through all of the software that was once “crucial” to my computing existence, I realized that I have so many more choices now in the open source world and not only that, most of the software that I use on Ubuntu I like better then stuff I paid for in Windows. What’s even more ironic is that over the course of my computing life I have purchased quite a bit of shareware and so much of it is either gone or no longer supported or requires an upgrade fee to get to the most current version. This annoys me to no end. Conversely, in the open source world, you can donate to the developers who have put together the software you like and use to encourage more development and to say thank you. I’m not suggesting that there isn’t some software that’s worth paying for but in many cases there are better solutions in the open source world.

Take the Gimp as an example. I am not a graphics/photo professional but I like having the ability to use powerful editing tools. For me, I wouldn’t pay for the latest and greatest version of PhotoShop because the return on investment isn’t there for me. However, after using the Gimp for a while I’ve begun to really prefer it as my editing tool versus other available software.

Another example is Forte Agent (usenet reader). I purchased a license for it forever ago (7 years??). It wasn’t terribly expensive and I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth over the years however like so much software it was basically abandoned for several years. Forte got acquired at some point and they put Agent on a shelf somewhere. Some folks ended up spinning back off from their parent company and began to redevelop the product. They made some nice changes to it but the product is so old that they’ve kind of missed the boat. After a couple of years of redevelopment they have made a product that some folks might find kind of useful now but in order to use it you need to pay $20 to upgrade your copy. Not to mention that I’ve already paid an upgrade “fee” once in it’s redevelopment. I so rarely use usenet anymore that I can’t imagine paying five cents to upgrade at this point. Plus if I want to use usenet, I’ve got many open source alternatives including Pan which is awesome. So, today during my clean up efforts, I uninstalled Agent and I don’t think I’ll end up using it again.

Then there’s the various pieces of software that I paid for and lost the license key for that I can’t use anymore. There have been several instances where I’ve contacted the developers and attempted to get a replacement key but they never respond. How fair is that? I feel very different about donating money to open source developers. I don’t feel like they owe me anything whereas if I pay for a license I expect a certain level of responsiveness.

In any case, the point of this post is that I’m looking at all of the computers I own and run and I’m looking to rid myself of proprietary stuff wherever possible. It just feels right.

There’s a nice tutorial on installing Pidgin from sources here: jhcore.com » Install Pidgin in Ubuntu

The only thing I’d do different is to use checkinstall to create a deb file so that it’s easier to manage new versions, etc. However this is mentioned in a comment by another person. I did go through this tutorial to make sure I wasn’t missing anything in my previous attempts at configuring Pidgin and I guess I didn’t have a couple of the dependencies satisfied required to make Google Talk work. However, even after install all of the recommended dependencies I still can’t manage to connect to Google Talk. I get an “authorization failed” message now. It also seems to me that the instructions for configuring Pidgin have changed on the Google pages.

I have continued to use Kopete which connects easily (for me) to the 3 services I use (AIM, Yahoo, Google). It also has a nice set of built-in sounds to use for new conversations as well as other features that make me want to continue to use it. The only feature that Pidgin has that I’m dying to try is “psychic mode” but I can live without that for now.

I have been blogging on and off for many years. I started with blogger, switched to Movable Type and eventually switched over to WordPress many years ago. Due to various circumstances I stopped blogging for a while and about 4 months ago I started this blog up. Over the past 4 months not one spam comment has made it through. During my previous blog writing years blog spam was always an issue. Actually when I first started blogging there was no such thing as blog spam and when it started up I was shocked. It was a constant battle to prune out spam comments and many utilities popped up over the years to prevent blog spam but none of them worked as well as Askimet does now. Great job on the part of the developers of both WordPress and Askimet to prevent blog spam.

I wasn’t aware that this was hardware failure week but apparently it is. In some previous posts I’ve talked about my 2nd SATA drive going bad. I also mentioned that I had started monitoring my hardware a little more closely. Using the sensors panel applet I saw that my CPU fan was spinning like crazy and the internal temps of my machine were quite high. This might be expected if I was doing some serious work but my computer was basically idle. So, I look around the case and one of the fans is spinning at about 2 RPM. Not a good sign. I turn the PC off, and open up the case to start inspecting. As is usual, there was plenty of dust and crud surrounding all of the fan vents, etc so I broke out the vacuum and started a clean up effort. As I was going through my clean up I noticed that the fan on the back of the power supply was remarkably clean. In fact, upon further inspection it appears that the power supply fan has probably never turned one revolution. Crap! This particular power supply/case combo I put together probably 1.5 years ago and never inspected that particular fan. Looks like I’m off to buy a new power supply and case. The case wasn’t particularly nice anyway and I’d like to get a case with a bit more room inside.

After doing a serious cleaning of the components in my PC, libsensors is reporting back a much more normal temp and fan speed internally. I also propped a big giant fan behind the PC to blow air through and that is definitely helping too. While libsensors didn’t exactly tell me that my power supply fan wasn’t turning it did lead me down the path to investigate fan speeds and temps which lead me to figure out my power supply was bad.

Also of note, I tried the “freezer trick” on my bad drive. Apparently if a drive goes bad sometimes if you put it in the freezer for some time you can get it to spin one more time. No luck.

I’ve earmarked several different articles from various magazines for new projects to try out. Here’s what I’m hoping to do:

From Linux Magazine: Building applications with Gantry. Gantry is a Perl based web application framework. Sounds very interesting to try and mess with.

Linux Format Magazine: MySQL: Code with PHP. I have some experience with both PHP and MySQL so it should be an easy project but I’m looking forward to trying out the code in the article.

Linux Format Magazine: Mono: Code your own GTK App. This is a follow up article based on the command line RSS reader I built a few months ago. I started this one already.

Linux Format Magazine: Mono: Objects and Generics. Another Mono based tutorial.

Linux Journal: Programming Python, Part 1. This will probably be my next project as I’ve been wanting to mess with Python for a while and this looks like a good intro.

Linux Journal: Extend OpenOffice.org. This article is a tutorial on creating OpenOffice extensions which sounds like fun.

Now, If I can only find time to do all of these cool things!!!!

Due to a recent drive failure an article in the latest Linux Format magazine caught my eye on setting up hardware monitoring. Following the tutorials and examples in the magazine I’m now monitoring much more of my hardware. The first recommendation is to install the package lm-sensors. It’s available in the Ubuntu repositories so I installed it and then configured it. After installing the package, you need to run:

sudo sensors-detect

Which will probe various parts of your system to find what can be monitored. After doing that it will advise you on what new modules need to be loaded in order to use full monitoring. You can add them to /etc/modules so that they are loaded every time your system boots. Additionally, you can load them by typing modprobe modulename if you want to get to work immediately. After loading the modules, if you type sensors at a command prompt, you’ll get some info about your system including temps, etc. Once I got it working I then installed the sensors applet so that I can use some graphical widgets to display system info.

Also of note in the article is configuring smartmontools to monitor the “smart” status of hard drives. Using this package allows you to gather some information from the built in monitoring tools on your drives. Mind you, just because the SMART status is ok doesn’t mean your drive is in perfect health and won’t fail, however conversely, if the SMART status is bad, you would be well advised to start moving stuff off of that drive because it’s almost definitely going to go bad. According to some of the tests I’ve run using smartmontools my “main” drive has about 13,000 hours left on it.

Some quick commands to use with the smartmontools package -

smartctl -i /dev/hda (or whatever drive) - This will let you know if your drive supports SMART and if it’s enabled. Also note, if you have a SATA drive, the command looks like this:

sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda -d ata

The -d ata must be added to the end of any command you use if it’s a SATA drive.

smartctl -H /dev/hda - Basic health report on the drive.

smartctl -t short /dev/hda - Runs a short test on the drive - takes one to two minutes.

smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda - Returns the results of the short (or long test).

smartctl -t long /dev/hda - Runs the long test on the drive - takes 95 minutes or so.

So, using these new tools will hopefully give me a better feel for what my hardware is doing and will help me avoid major hardware issues in the future. For more info get the May 2007 edition of Linux Format magazine!

I’ve been posting a bunch about issues I’ve been having with various hardware. Time for some updates.

First, my 2nd SATA drive that “disappeared” apparently has really gone bad. I read a bit more on the web and there was a suggestion to do a cold boot which I did. I haven’t done that in a long time, figuring that reboots would be sufficient to clear out anything that was hung up but after shutting down the PC and restarting, the drive made all kinds of clicking noises which can’t be good. It’s also no longer detected in the bios so I’m guessing the drive has really gone away. Quite sad as it’s not even a year old but I’m glad that it’s not related to my install of Ubuntu.

Second, X and nVidia - I have no idea why, but when I downloaded the last round of updates, it didn’t get the right libraries required to run the nVidia kernel modules. When I went into the restricted drivers program I enabled it, rebooted and now have nVidia running. I had to modify my xorg.conf to re-enable a few things but I’m satisfied with the way everything is working now.

Lastly, my camera. Still doesn’t work. I thought maybe the cold boot would resolve that too but it didn’t happen.

I primarily use IM as a means of keeping in touch with work people. Due to some circumstances, I’m now using IM on my Ubuntu PC which means I need to find the “right” IM client. So, here’s my experiences:

1. Gaim - I fired up Gaim as it is presently installed on my machine. I set up my Yahoo and AIM accounts without issue. Tried to set up my Google Talk account but had no luck. I went to the Google Talk help page and there weren’t instructions for Gaim. I followed the instructions for other clients but couldn’t make it work.

2. Pidgin - Pidgin is the successor to Gaim and as such there were instructions for setting up Google Talk. Unfortunately Pidgin isn’t available in the repositories yet so I had to download sources and build it. After building it and installing it it read my Gaim account list and seemed to work right away. However, no Google Talk.

3. Kopete - I had to install it but it was in the repos so I just got it working immediately. Also - no Google Talk!!! However, Kopete provided me with a reasonable error message and it turns out I was missing a package for SSL support (qca-tls). Once I installed that package I get Google Talk!

I would guess that the others may also work now that I have installed this package but being that Kopete was the one to identify the problem and solution I’m going to use it for a bit.

I seem to remember a lot of posts about Pidgin when it was released and a lot of folks seemed really excited about it. I may give it another go later on if Kopete annoys me in some way.